Lucas Penny - Bionanolab mentee and a collaborating high school student working with Steven Panesar has won multiple awards this past May 2016.
Lucas Penny, Grimsby Sec. School, grade 11 student won a gold medal at the Canada Wide Science Fair and Canada’s most prestigious innovation award from the Ernest C. Manning Innovation Awards. Lucas will be honoured at the Foundation’s Awards Gala this Oct. and receives $7,500 for his innovative science fair project which is a low-cost system for detecting breast cancer in the early stages.
Early breast cancer detection earns our major student award!
Lucas Penny, 17, Grade 11 student at Grimsby Secondary School, has been actively involved with science most of his life and this year focused on finding a successful, low-cost system for detecting breast cancer in its early stages. For those efforts he earned a $7,500 Young Canadian Innovator Award and a trip to our National Awards Gala this October in Halifax where he will be honoured.
This Gold-medal study conducted at the BioNanoLab of the University of Guelph under the supervision of Steven Panesar and Professor Suresh Neethirajan, used a profile of miRNA, which are pieces of specialized genetic material used in regulating gene expression, characteristic to breast cancer, for earlier detection of the onset of breast cancer. Penny found that these miRNAs could be found in saliva providing an easy, non-invasive way of obtaining the miRNAs and testing for the onset of breast cancer in different patients. To do this, Penny devised a way to make use of quantum dots (normally used in TVs to produce different colours), which are particles that are one-millionth of a centimeter big that produce light when activated. Penny combined these quantum dots with their own miRNAs. Furthermore, he developed a piece of genetic material that acts as an infrastructure for miRNAs to interact with, but on its own, will produce a certain coloured light that is able to be detected. However, only when a specific miRNA from the breast cancer profile is present, will the cancer-specific miRNA, as well as the quantum dot bind to the infrastructure and activate the quantum dot to produce a different coloured light that is able to be detected, indicating the presence of cancer.
In addition to creating the required miRNAs and specialized quantum dots, Penny created a device that will combine the saliva of the patient in question with the quantum dots and infrastructure genetic material, which will mix and produce either the light from the infrastructure indicating the absence of cancer, or will emit light from the quantum dot indicating the presence of cancer.
The method, in conjunction with the device Penny created, will be able to detect changes in the range of one quadrillionth of a gram to one billionth of a gram of miRNA, which will determine if a patient has early signs of cancer. This model that Penny developed, with its extreme sensitivity, will also be very cheap, being approximately five dollars per test. It can be very quick, taking less than 10 minutes to return results and with further miRNA profile characterization of other cancers or diseases, it may be possible to have a non-invasive, inexpensive quick and easy test for early onset of various diseases.
